Business analytics solutions mine through databases full of data looking for answers to business problems using data inputs that take various forms. A particular type of business analytics solution known as question-answering (QA) technology is a computer-based approach in which a computer application mines stored data in attempting to automatically answer questions.
A particular type of QA approach, known as DeepQA by IBM®, is a computer system that can directly and precisely answer natural language questions over an open and broad range of knowledge (IBM is a trademark of International Business Machines Corporation registered in many jurisdictions worldwide). DeepQA involves the integration and advancement of Natural Language Processing, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and massively parallel computation to provide open-domain automatic question answering technology.
Natural language (or natural language form) is data that is arranged in sentences and paragraphs, e.g., similar to how paragraphs are arranged in a book, e.g., for human reading. Non-natural language form is data arranged in a form other than natural language form, and may comprise, for example, technical documents, information technology problem tickets, program defect reports, medical reports, software program test reports, database data, delimited data, etc. QA systems are adept at handling data sources that are in natural language form. However, when data sources are not natural language or are mixed sources including some natural language and some non-natural language sources, a QA system may be confused by the data and need specific programming for handling the non-natural language sources. This difficulty in handling non-natural language sources affects generic applicability of the QA approach.
A conventional technique for converting database data to natural language involves mail merge. Any particular mail merge solution, however, is disadvantageously constrained to supporting only a single database source, and to work only with pre-parsed data.